PARALLEL DATA LAB 

PDL Abstract

Fast Log-based Concurrent Writing of Checkpoints

Proceedings of the 3rd Petascale Data Storage Workshop held in conjunction with Supercomputing '08, November 17, 2008, Austin, TX.

Milo Polte, Jiri Simsa, Wittawat Tantisiriroj, Garth A. Gibson, Shobhit Dayal, Mikhail Chainani, Dilip Kumar Uppugandla

School of Computer Science
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA 15213

This report describes how a file system level log-based technique can improve the write performance of many-to-one write checkpoint workload typical for high performance computations. It is shown that a simple log-based organization can provide for substantial improvements in the write performance while retaining the convenience of a single flat file abstraction. The improvement of the write performance comes at the cost of degraded read performance however. Techniques to alleviate the read performance penalty, such as file reconstruction on the first read, are discussed.

FULL PAPER: pdf